ATO delivers platform-neutral business portal

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Tests carried out by members of the Open Source Industry
Association indicate that the Australian Taxation Office's business
portal works on Linux, OSIA director Con Zymaris said in a
statement today.

The business portal is the ATO's gateway to online services for
businesses. The OSIA is the national industry body for open source
in Australia.

Zymaris said the ATO deserved praise for supplying a tool which
appeared to be truly cross-platform and based on open standards and
well documented protocols.

"We hope that Linux and open source browsers such as Firefox
will soon be on the official list of supported environments. OSIA
members have reported successfully submitting their Business
Activity Statements through the portal, using open source browsers
running on Linux," he said.

A 'proof of concept' set-up on Linux took less than half an hour
for the OSIA members who had tested the portal.

"That was without any documentation whatsoever. It should be
trivial for the ATO to now add Linux to the list of supported
platforms, especially with the instructions that OSIA members
developed. OSIA is ready to help the ATO with certification of the
portal under Linux. Most of the hard work has already been done by
ATO programmers," Zymaris said.

This meant that businesses which always had to keep a Windows PC
around, solely to deal with the ATO through the Electronic Commerce
Interface (ECI) application would no longer have to bother. "We
applaud the ATO for choosing the path of true interoperability. The
need for legacy Windows machines has now diminished and we can
start retiring them in favour of Linux," he said.

The OSIA was now asking the ATO to produce a "vanilla"
distribution of the Common-use Signing Interface (CSI), an
essential part of the business portal, packaged in the customary
platform independent "tarball" format, which Linux users could
deploy natively and to officially support Linux clients.

"This is a very gratifying development," Zymaris said. "We are
very pleased with the way ATO has put this together. As Linux
desktop usage grows, we expect government agency support of
Australian citizens running Linux to grow as well."